LA Synthesis - 'Matrix Surfer'
No. 33 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
LA Synthesis stands for “Linear Arithmetic Synthesis,” a term invented by Japan’s Roland Corporation to describe the unique power of 1987’s D-50 synthesizer, which overlaid choir, wind and string samples with digital sound waves to create gorgeous and famous presets like “Digital Native Dance,” “Glass Voices” and “Living Calliope.” It’s also the name of one of techno’s most extraordinary, ethereal and melodic acts, whose Matrix Surfer album lives on as a timeless artifact of European electronica’s deepest dreaming and yearning, manifesting giant pacific waves in cyberspace.
England’s Tony Gallagher and Carl Grant, who hailed from Liverpool and Birmingham, formed LA Synthesis in 1992 after meeting in the South London rave scene. They hit it off after discovering they shared a taste for Warp, Juan Atkins and Steve Reich, and developed a cosmic cybernetic sound that rejoiced in the sublime. Promo copies of their epic ‘Agraphobia’ appeared in 1994, a tip of the hat to their love of wide sonic shapes, immediately turning heads with its endlessly spiraling saw lines and pulse waves, cut through with melodies that sparkled as if in an ice cave.
But LA Synthesis weren’t just about the chin-stroking armchair posture. Their compositions wound to propulsive drums and liquid bass crashing at the edge of the dance floor. Mr. C‘s Plink Plonk label released ‘Agraphobia’ with a Kenny Larkin remix, drawing on Gallagher and Grant’s obvious affinity for Detroit techno’s kinetic beauty: “A cinematic concoction of swirling melodies and reverberating ambient swells built around a monster groove of pure syncopated funkiness, LA Synthesis’ ‘Agrophobia’ was one of last year’s finest moments. Its dancefloor success proved that abstract techno didn't just belong to the highbrow trainspotter,” wrote Dave Mothersole for Muzik magazine in 1994, capturing the song’s under and over transcendence.
In an article titled “Synth Or Swim,” Mothersole identified the sweet zone that Gallagher and Grant scoured and sculpted, somewhere between dance floor and head trip with a powerful leap into the melodic. “What we strive for is dance music which is mixable and accessible,” Gallagher explained. “We want to make tunes that a DJ can drop in anywhere.” Which is how ‘Agraphobia’ works. It sneaks in, but it builds and builds and builds. As Mothersole recounted, this was reflected in the real world by their work ethic and ambition. “They started working together, polishing up their programming skills and developing their own style while also building the sort of studio set-up most techno acts only dare to dream of,” he wrote.
In 1996, they released their Frozen Tundra E.P., featuring the title track and an energetic ‘Why Is My Mind,’ exploring an interstellar and alien aesthetic anchored in hypnotic, percussive blizzards. The same year, they released a single on Essex label A13 (the future home of John Tejada’s first techno albums and the Plaid alias Repeat), containing ‘CMI Wave Sequence’ and ‘The Beacon,’ the former a melancholic techno epic that prefigured Boards of Canada, and the latter a dramatic, robotic, electro stormer. On a roll, they next released ‘Reich’ and ‘Zebra’ on Blue Basique. The Underground Resistance classic ‘Jupiter Jazz’ is a clear influence on ‘Reich,’ a scintillating beauty that also applies Steve Reich’s harmonic rhythmic process. Melodically mirroring the same motif, ‘Zebra’ goes even deeper. It’s a stunner.
Grant, a science fiction buff and deep thinker, suffused their persona with the imagination of a quantum traveler, musing about the vibrations of reality and the human community. “Imagine a universe where every thought is not merely a flicker of the mind but a powerful broadcast, echoing through the cosmos,” he would offer in his Vortexian writings years later. “Music, the universal language that speaks to the soul, holds a power beyond mere entertainment; it shapes our vibrational reality.” With his brother Kendrix (an influential London DJ and musician in his own right), Grant represented an Afro-Futuristic and Black English consciousness echoing the tribulations and triumphs of multiracial alliances across the global spectrum.
While the British and American governments squeezed the free expression of electronic dance movements throughout the ’90s, the artistic integrity of Detroit techno, combined with breakbeat mutations in London, provided something of a “Second Wave” in electronica’s evolution circa 1992 through 1997. There was the “Intelligent Dance Music” contingent, à la Warp artists like B12 and The Black Dog. There was Kirk Degiorgio’s As One, the New Electronica label, Russ Gabriel’s Ferox label and his classic Voltage Control album, InSync vs. Mysteron’s album Android Architect, Steve Pickton’s Stasis works, 4 Hero’s collaborations with Juan Atkins, Stefan Robbers’ Eevo Lute Muzique, and the sci-fi drum ‘n’ bass of Photek, LTJ Bukem, and Jonny L. America’s echo back included Kenny Larkin’s Pod, Stacey Pullen’s Kosmic Messenger and Silent Phase, Dan Curtin’s Silver Dawn, Mundo Muzique, Psychedelic Research Lab, and of course the inimitable Carl Craig.
Whether in the tradition of dub pioneers like the Scientist and Mad Professor, Parliament-Funkadelic genius George Clinton, the space jazz of Sun Ra and Herbie Hancock, the electro funk of Afrika Bambaata, Hashim, and Egyptian Lover, Afrobeat lords Fela Kuti and Tony Allen, or electronic pioneers like Kraftwerk, Quincy Jones, Brian Eno, Talking Heads, Tangerine Dream, Depeche Mode, Giorgio Moroder, and Vangelis, with a healthy dose of Chicago house, from Mr. Fingers and Phuture, to Glenn Underground and Jungle Wonz, the waters of LA Synthesis ran very deep; Gallagher and Grant took all of these influences into their D-50 sample machine, arranging their roots and semitones, their chords and choirs, awaiting patiently.
“Anybody who has witnessed one of LA Synthesis’ PAs will testify as to just how in control Tony and Carl are. Their set is a seamless journey of beautifully orchestrated sound composed of movements rather than parts, all delivered totally live with top RAM, hard-drive accuracy,” wrote Mothersole. “On-line to the future.” And so they leaned into their sixth sense of sound, the past and future loaded into their D-50 synthesizer, and a “Second Wave” of surfers all about them, riding this wave and dropping in on that wave, carving the faces of rolling inclines, with cutbacks and sometimes wipeouts, in the ‘90s set after set of killer waves pounding the shore.
Locking themselves in their studio, LA Synthesis labored on Matrix Surfer for two years after securing a deal with France’s Shield Records. “We just weren't in a hurry,” Gallagher noted, like a surfer waiting for the perfect wave. ”We've been programming solidly for years, but we wanted to compete at a certain level. So we waited until we were good enough. Working with computers is all about manipulating sound and it takes time to get that right. Once you've done that, you're totally in control.” While sharing some of the quirky warbles and break-y aesthetic of The Black Dog, the album’s eponymous ‘Matrix Surfer’ and ‘Positive Negative’ catch the wave with aplomb, gliding effortlessly from the get-go into a big booming metronome.
It’s that grid-like undergirding that maps out the oceanic voyages ahead. Recorded and released three years before The Matrix film, Matrix Surfer reminds us that there was once a time when myths about the machine were undiscovered, whether it was the frontier of Tron, with its echoes of the Western — when Tron, Ram and Flynn rest their cycles and drink at an electric stream — or the dystopian acid rain Hades-scape of Los Angeles in Blade Runner — where androids, or Replicants, dream of living free with lifespans as long as humans, capturing and embodying the baby-like bursts of our own future imaginations. And in the sounds of LA Synthesis, we can hear that deep inner life that hums today in billions of phones, computers and algorithms.
Just as magical to Grant and Gallagher was surfing the waves of the wider universe. For Matrix Surfer also inhabits a marooned ambience. Picking up from their breakout ‘Agraphobia,’ which thankfully is included here, ‘Wasteland’ struts to a moody groove, its bass line bubbling under the acid clouds of a poison planet. A ‘Frozen Tundra Dub’ takes these excursive pleasures further into the unknown, its tapping drums swinging under the snowcapped mountains of some distant moon. Each time, melodies react to airborne rhythms in what feels like a chemical chain reaction, at once beautiful and strange to behold. In this wider view, ‘Agraphobia’ itself calls to mind the familiar formations of alien worlds, from the Face on Mars to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, engaging planetary geographies with low gravity leaps, drifts and arcs.
While it was released before Matrix Surfer, the centerpiece of ‘Agraphobia’ plays a crucial role in the album as an album. As part of the last decade when long-players were conceived and received as deeper narrative experiences, LA Synthesis’s most famous composition fits seamlessly as the nerve center of an infiniteness core to their sound. It undulates and whips, and stirs and quakes, rumbles and thrashes and floats and surprises. Surfing a sonic info-world of electrical currents, synthesized samples, filters and arpeggios, accelerandos and glissandos, of modulators and oscillators, ones and zeroes, ‘Agraphobia’ or “agoraphobia” — the fear of crowds and packed places — prefigured a future in which hearts and souls would yearn to breathe.*
In this vein and returning to the circuit flux of opener ‘Matrix Surfer,’ LA Synthesis steps back into the more cyberpunk and Blade Runner-esque mind-scapes of ‘If’ and ‘Du Androids Dream’ — the former races to a faster beat, buzzy synths zipping by like median lights on the windshield of a flying police car (“spinner”) reconnoitering above a neon city; the latter rolls to a funky groove, a robot chicken plucking to the resonant vibrations of an upright bass calling to mind the androids that cartwheel and leap and punch through walls in Blade Runner — evoking the altered cyber-states of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Taking a more electro angle, ‘Fromage Centralle’ stretches like a corrugating neural network in waves of elastic sound, its French a play on words, a phat and fat “central cheese,” the big cheese — Paris.
But the best comes last with a tone poem for the ages. ‘Zyllvakrynn’ is one of the most beautiful compositions of all time and by itself secures LA Synthesis as great heroes in the techno pantheon. It burns with an oracular fire, its melody unfolding in the sky like rain curtains of quicksilver, its quiet drums and piano forming a lullaby for princely sleep — the good omen of doves swirling at a long quest’s homecoming.**
What does the strange word “Zyllvakrynn” mean? It’s not a word found in any language but some strange doodle of sequenced letters that draw a sweet sound. That’s fitting for a band that is still obscure and shrouded in mystery. Not unlike “Linear Arithmetic Synthesis,” it points to bigger waves on the far horizon.***
In 1997, global techno was just about to enter a lower tide. While it had also propagated across the Americas and Asia — from Ricardo Villalobos to Ken Ishii — indie labels in the UK and US were getting seduced by the majors, where most new artist rosters briefly glimmered then retired or died — the waves calming.
At the same time, new underground labels struggled or went stealth to survive. Shield Records released As One’s excellent Art of Prophecy that same year, while Peacefrog Records sponsored stalwart artists like Ian O’Brien and Luke Slater. And Global Communication gave LA Synthesis another spirited electronica ride.
But the duo’s Harmonic Disassembly E.P. in some ways marked a “duckdive,” going under to the base of the wave. Its title track was an electro anthem, part of the darker funk resurgence of the late ‘90s, right up there with The Advent’s 1998 classic, ‘Program Da Futur’ — tripped-out flashes in a laser-bass pipeline.
And while other gems like the night-driving ‘Skyline,’ the organ-soul of ‘Doidy Dawg’ echoing O’Brien’s ‘Monkey Jazz,’ and the starry gazer ‘Identity Crisis,’ spoke to their continued relevance, perhaps nothing burned brighter than 2012’s ‘Reprise,’ via Belgium’s De:Tuned — a gorgeous world-changer set to forever.
Still active, with Gallagher hovering in here and there, LA Synthesis have pushed forward against all odds, studying the wind and praising the masters. With knowledge and gratitude through their DJ sets and performances as Serendipity Transmits, Grant and his brother watched the tides, dreaming of a giant uniter.
Which is why they’re a great synthesizer, mixing the digital and the real with the nonlinear arithmetic of the soul. Because above our cyberspace gather the storms of happenstance. And for every matrix surfer facing the waves or lost in the ocean, their synthesis endures — a star ablaze in the distance.
Track Listing:
1. Matrix Surfer
2. Positive Negative
3. Fromage Centralle
4. Wasteland
5. Frozen Tundra
6. Agraphobia
7. If
8. Du Androids Dream
9. Frozen Tundra Dub
10. Zyllvakrynn
*In 2015, Belgium’s De:Tuned records, home to several releases of like-minded producers from the 1990s, including David Morley, Stasis, B12, Robert Leiner, The Kosmik Kommando, Terrace, Steve Stoll and As One, commissioned an acclaimed mini-remix album of ‘Agraphobia’ featuring Plaid, Ian O’Brien and Terrace, titled Agraphobia Relapse, a fitting title.
I will also note here that while Matrix Surfer in many ways does not have a precedent, it does have a worthy successor — Aphelion’s incredible album Zugzwang, released in 2000, put out by Clair Poulton’s deFocus label, one of the vanguard outfits at the forefront of a third wave.
**Still a Tom Middleton favorite, ‘Zyllvakrynn’ won LA Synthesis a place on Global Communication’s Evolution label, where they would pen the electro classic ‘Harmonic Disassembly.’ Also worth checking out are LA Synthesis’s releases for A13 and Blue Basique. They would also co-write music with Middleton for Carl Cox’s Intec Digital.
***LA Synthesis is still alive and kicking. In more recent years, Carl Grant (“AKA Matrix Surfer”) has proceeded, releasing more material, including archived tracks, via his Vortexian Recordings on Bandcamp, new collaborations, live DJ and PA bookings, Soundcloud outputs, radio broadcasts, and writings.